A Corpus-based Study Of Spelling Errors Made By Chinese High School Students

In recent years, spelling is an important standard to test the degree that students master the words they have learned in classroom, and the study on spelling has aroused scholars' interest.However, most studies at home and abroad only concentrate on the spelling errors made by English learners from different language levels, or researchers collected and analyzed the data within a specific class and school. So an inclusive and objective study is needed in this research field. In view of such situation, all data are selected from CLEC, and spelling errors in ST2 are analyzed in this thesis.On the basis of previous studies, four main types are summarized for spelling errors in this paper, including phonological deviation, graphemic deviation, morphological deviation and coinage. 500 samples are collected from ST2 in CLEC and spelling errors are analysed in order to find the main characteristics and reasons of spelling errors. The results of this thesis:Firstly, regarding to the distribution of spelling errors, 314 spelling errors belong to phonological deviation; 130 spelling errors belong to graphemic deviation; 17 spelling errors belong to morphological deviation and 39 spelling errors belong to coinage. Secondly, as to the reasons of spelling errors, three major reasons are discussed: the complexity of phonetic system; the improper use of grammar rules; the negative transfer of mother language. Thirdly,for spelling instructions, some suggestions are given to teachers in order to lower the chance of spelling errors and improve students' spelling accuracy. It is hoped that the research results will fill in the blanks of previous studies on spelling errors and provide reference to English spelling instructions and future studies.